Julian Assange speaking at the Frontline international press club in London, on Tuesday 24th October 2011

Approx 1 hour 5 minutes near the end of the video clip:

The fallout from that was the we viewed that our submission system could not be trusted any more

So did everyone else with any clues about computer security and anonymity, including Daniel Domscheit-Berg and the "Architect", which is partly why they left in the first place.

As a result we have had to completely re-engineer, from scratch, a new generation submission system.

On November 28th, the one year anniversary of CableGate, we will

Now, wikileaks has never had only the one submission system. We've received information in a wide variety of means, just like intelligence agencies and professional, mainstream media organisations, receive their information from a wide variety of means.

It has been important to us, to always have a wide variety of means, so no one mean becomes the sole, the sole subject of infiltration or investigation.

However, for the last, for the last 12 months, for the last 12 months, you haven't been able to go through the front door to submit wikileaks sensitive, information

You've had to establish, contacts, with the organisation and transmit us the material through other mechanisms.

Is Assange claiming that people have actually been stupid enough to submit sensitive material to him in the last 12 months, through other means ?

Why has he not bothered to publish any of this new, "non-Bradley Manning" sourced stuff then ?

How exactly are these "other means" actually Anonymous or Secure ?

Remember that wikileaks stopped publishing a PGP Public Encryption Key years ago and their incompetence in using PGP as a means of symmetric encryption and then stupidly publishing their CableGate archive online around the world and the re-using the same pass phrase with Guardian journalist David Leigh, was an

Similarly, they stopped publishing a Tor Hidden Service even before they stopped accepting new submissions.

On November 28th, the one year anniversary of CableGate, we will launch our new generation submission system.

That includes, not just, a public interface, but also several other mechanisms that are necessary to deal with an attack on the entire internet security system, that has been established over the last few years, by intelligence agencies and criminal groups.

Right now, it is not possible to trust any https:// connection on the internet.

Utter rubbish !

Even wikileaks.org itself has, at various times, published a Self Signed Digital Certificate and has published the MD5 and SHA-1 cryptographic hash fingerprints, without relying on any built in web browser trust of Certificate Authorities.

It is not possible your banking system, it is not possible to trust any, regular, web based secure encryption system

What about banks which use SSL v3 Client Side Digital Certificates for mutual client / server authentication, without the need for any external Certificate Authority ?

That is because, intelligence agencies have infiltrated , a number of Certificate Authorities. Certificate Authorities are those authorities which
sign the cryptographic keys that are used for secure internet communication.

On November 28th, we will release our alternative to that system, which is independent of all Certificate Authorities

Is the something which Julian and his cult have created from scratch, or will they just steal / borrow the work of Moxie Marlinspike and SSLLabs etc. with Convergence ?

Remember that SSL / TLS encryption only provides Secrecy about most of the contents of an encrypted session, it does not provide any Anonymity, and, may in fact provide less anonymity than a non-SSL connection via a shared proxy server.

A question from the floor:

"I understand that you may be limited in what you can say, but how have you manage to get around the fact, that in your eyes, Certificate Authorities can't be trusted, with this particular submission system ?"

01:08:57

We will give full details here, on a conference, on November 28th

Full details ?? Don't hold your breath.

Will they publish the source code of their system, or even a detailed security architecture of what is is intend to actually do and protect against ?

On past performance, this is extremely unlikely.

I would like to say, that in that, this problem has been brewing over a number of years, and we were aware of it before, back in 2010, and we had a number of mechanisms to ameliorate that, ahh, thousands of robots that went out over the internet, to simulate being sources, to check to see, whether these "men-in-the-middle" or fabricated certificates existed.

So we had a number of different mechanisms to try to ameliorate that problem, but it is our view that the problem has now gone so severe, that even those attempts to ameliorate it, can no longer be trusted to the degree, that our sources expect us, to be able to solve the problem

More nonsense from the deliberately deceptive Julian Assange:

"thousands of robots" ??

At the time they claimed that this was to provide "cover traffic" to help to confuse Communications Traffic Analysis and thereby to improve the Anonymity of the submission system

This could not and would not have tested for any SSL "man-in-the-middle" attacks on the Security / Privacy of submissions.

Neither could it have detected compromised Certificate Authorities around the world, especially in places where the Government also controls international internet access.

Even if it was meant to do so, they obviously failed to detect a single example of such an attack aimed at wikileaks, or if they did, they must have covered it up.

Regardless of the technical merits of this new submission system, any whistleblower with really sensitive, life threatening information to publish, would have to be suicidal to trust Julian Assange and his WikiLeakS.org cult followers with it.

Categories:

About this blog

This blog here at WikiLeak.org (no "S") discusses the ethical and technical issues raised by the WikiLeakS.org project, which is trying to be a resource for whistleblower leaks, by providing "untraceable mass document leaking and analysis".

These are bold and controversial aims and claims, with both pros and cons, especially for something which crosses international boundaries and legal jurisdictions.

This blog is not part of the WikiLeakS.org project, and there really are no copies of leaked documents or files being mirrored here.

Email Contact

Please feel free to email us your views about this website or news about the issues it tries to comment on:

Before you send an email to this address, remember that this blog is independent of the WikiLeakS.org project.

If you have confidential information that you want to share with us, please make use of our PGP public encryption key or an email account based overseas e.g. Hushmail

LeakDirectory.org

Now that the WikiLeakS.org project is defunct, so far as new whistleblower are concerned, what are the alternatives ?

The LeakDirectory.org wiki page lists links and anonymity analyses of some of the many post-wikileaks projects.

There are also links to better funded "official" whistlblowing crime or national security reporting tip off websites or mainstream media websites. These should, in theory, be even better at protecting the anonymity and security of their informants, than wikileaks, but that is not always so.

New whistleblower website operators or new potential whistleblowers should carefully evaluate the best techniques (or common mistakes) from around the world and make their personal risk assessments accordingly.

Hints and Tips for Whistleblowers and Political Dissidents

The WikiLeakS.org Submissions web page provides some methods for sending them leaked documents, with varying degrees of anonymity and security. Anybody planning to do this for real, should also read some of the other guides and advice to political activists and dissidents:

Please take the appropriate precautions if you are planning to blow the whistle on shadowy and powerful people in Government or commerce, and their dubious policies. The mainstream media and bloggers also need to take simple precautions to help preserve the anonymity of their sources e.g. see Spy Blog's Hints and Tips for Whistleblowers - or use this easier to remember link: http://ht4w.co.uk

WikiLeakS Twitter feeds

The WikiLeakS.org website does not stay online all of the time, especially when there is a surge of traffic caused by mainstream media coverage of a particularly newsworthy leak.

Recently, they have been using their new Twitter feeds, to selectively publicise leaked documents to the media, and also to report on the status of routing or traffic congestion problems affecting the main website in Stockholm, Sweden.

N.B.the words "security" or "anonymity" and "Twitter" are mutually exclusive:

Campaign Button Links

Gary McKinnon is facing extradition to the USA under the controversial Extradition Act 2003, without any prima facie evidence or charges brought against him in a UK court. Try him here in the UK, under UK law.

FreeFarid.com - Kafkaesque extradition of Farid Hilali under the European Arrest Warrant to Spain

Parliament Protest blog - resistance to the Designated Area restricting peaceful demonstrations or lobbying in the vicinity of Parliament.

The Big Opt Out Campaign - opt out of having your NHS Care Record medical records and personal details stored insecurely on a massive national centralised database.

Tor - the onion routing network - "Tor aims to defend against traffic analysis, a form of network surveillance that threatens personal anonymity and privacy, confidential business activities and relationships, and state security. Communications are bounced around a distributed network of servers called onion routers, protecting you from websites that build profiles of your interests, local eavesdroppers that read your data or learn what sites you visit, and even the onion routers themselves."

Home Office Watch blog, "a single repository of all the shambolic errors and mistakes made by the British Home Office compiled from Parliamentary Questions, news reports, and tip-offs by the Liberal Democrat Home Affairs team."